New Year’s

The world outside is blanketed with fresh snow, giving this new year that feeling of a clean slate.  All past sins are forgiven and time has come to really move on.  "Behold, the old has gone.  The new has come.  He is a new creation."  The woman staring back at me in the mirror has a sadness in her eyes I do not enjoy, but am unable to lose.  That glimpse I caught of myself will haunt me for a few days.  Caught up in cooking and serving, preparing and sharing, New Year’s often is a whirlwind of friends and laughter and drinks.  Jokes old and new are exchanged.  New friendships are created and old friendships are rekindled.  We acknowledge this need to cling to each other, though I’m not sure any of us completely understand it.

I’m not ready to return to Michigan, with its distant folk and cold landscape.  Or perhaps I mean cold folk and distant landscape.  Either way holds true for me.  Looking back has always been my forte, even to a fault, while looking to the future is often too scary to consider.  But this calendar change might actually become a change-over for me.  "The movie goes on, and nobody in the audience has any idea."  I don’t belong in Fredonia anymore.  I’ve moved beyond that.  But I’m also never going to belong in Michigan either.  I will forever live somewhere between those worlds and I need to stop clinging so tightly to one and rejecting the other so completely.  There has to be a place where I don’t constantly see that sad, mournful, smiling woman anymore.

Perhaps all this sounds like a depressing New Year’s, but I do not see if that way.  I’ve turned some kind of corner tonight.  Perhaps it had to do with the change of the calendar or it could have been something else completely.  But I’m not the person I once was, nor do I desire to be that person anymore.  I’m going to move past that.

There is a large hole in my parent’s front yard from years and years ago when a tree was pulled out of the ground, along with its stump.  The hole was never filled, but nor has it been ignored.  It needs constant attention when running around playing in the yard, lest you fall in or twist an ankle.  When mowing, the wheels sometimes get caught and the grass is cut oddly that week.  But tonight looking out on the lawn, the snow has covered the imperfection.  If I didn’t know it was there, I wouldn’t have believed it ever existed.  I still know I’ll have to tread carefully when running about out there, but the hole does not define the lawn or the house.  The holes in my life, the holes in my heart where people have been uprooted and violently torn out will no longer define me.  The lawn and I… we have a clean blanket of snow for today.